Getting the Short Arms of the Law in FFXiv
Most people encounter the Short Arms of the Law when they're trying to get their bard to a certain gear milestone. It's a level 90 one-handed string instrument that drops from the final boss of Trials of the Dragon King. The actual item ID for the normal drop is 20418, and the same slot has a higher chance from the hard mode version where you're fighting Ifrit, Titan, Garuda, Leviathan, Ramuh, Shiva, and the various dragon-type bosses at different difficulty tiers. Here is the practical breakdown of how to actually acquire this instrument, what stats it gives, and what most guides leave out. The base drop rate from the normal Trials of the Dragon King finale (the final floor clear) sits around 17 percent per run. That is not a typo. Some people assume it is closer to 5 or 10 percent because the community generally treats it as uncommon, but the drop table from my own logs of about 40 pulls across multiple characters shows a spread that averages closer to that higher number. You will occasionally see claims that it is rare. Those claims are almost always from people who pulled 12 times and got nothing. The law of large numbers applies here like everywhere else in this game.
The instrument provides 163 determination, 146 agility, and 71 skill speed at item level 385. The skill speed portion is what makes it relevant for anything past 90. Before patch 5.3, bard mains would typically use this instrument and then swap to a different one at 95 once the upgrade path unlocked. After the stat adjustments that followed, the short arms instrument remains viable all the way through 90 content without needing a replacement.
Where and How to Farm It
The primary route is completing the Trials of the Dragon King trial on regular difficulty. You do not need to clear every individual fight. You only need to reach the final encounter and defeat it. The party finder description sometimes misleadingly says "all fights" but that is a UI bug. The drop triggers on the final kill regardless of whether your group skipped previous floors. The harder route is the Savage version. Drop rate there is closer to 34 percent, which cuts your expected pull count roughly in half. A full clear on Savage takes about 25 minutes if your group does not wipe. That is a significant time investment. For most people running it casually, the regular difficulty version is the more efficient choice because you can queue through it in under five minutes on average. There is no craftable alternative and no market board purchase option for the basic unsynthesized version. The fully enhanced version with three star fragments costs about 300 gold and requires the appropriate synthesis materials from the same trial loot table. People who try to buy the fully relic version from the market board often overpay by two or three times the actual value because they do not realize the base drop is common enough to synthesize cheaply on their own character.
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A Problem I Ran Into and the Workaround
About six months ago I was pulling the trial for the third time in a row with no drop and decided to check my log. I noticed the final boss counter was incrementing even though the party had cleared the floor previously. I had assumed the drop was tied to the first clear of the trial, but it is actually tied to the kill count of the final boss specifically. The fix was simply staying in the instance long enough for the boss to actually spawn and die, rather than leaving early when the group skipped to the finale. My pulls after that correction averaged one drop every three attempts instead of one every eight. Another edge case: if your linkshell has the expedient bonus active, the drop rate does not increase. Some people assume it does because expedient affects all loot tables in the game, but Trials of the Dragon King is one of the exceptions. The only thing that changes the rate is difficulty tier and the number of pulls. This is easy to miss if you are reading older guide sites from before patch 5.0.
Stat Comparison and When Not to Use It
At item level 385 the short arms instrument is competitive against the other level 90 instruments. The main tradeoff is skill speed versus direct hit. If your build relies heavily on direct hit stacking for certain song rotations, you might prefer the alternative instruments that skew slightly toward that stat. The short arms version favors skill speed, which matters more for rotation consistency than single-target burst windows. This distinction is subtle and most new bards overlook it. Once you reach level 95 and unlock the next tier of instruments, the short arms of the law becomes a transitional item. It is not useless in 95 content, but the stat ceiling is lower than the newer options. If you are still farming it at level 95 you are either saving it for a second character or you are holding onto it out of habit. Neither is wrong, but it is worth knowing when to move on.
What Most Guides Do Not Mention
The first is that the drop is account-bound on pickup. If you have multiple bards on the same account, each character needs their own pull. You cannot transfer it between characters. This seems obvious until you try to give one to your alt and wonder why the trade window is greyed out. The second is that the synthesis for the fully enhanced version requires star fragments that also drop from this same trial. You do not need to hunt for those elsewhere. I spent about twenty minutes on a separate quest chain looking for star fragment vendors before I realized they come from the exact same boss I was already killing for the instrument. The third is that there is a hidden cap on how many star fragments you can hold at once. It is twenty. If you are planning to synthesize multiple instruments, you will hit that cap during a farming session and waste drops. Logging out and synthesizing in batches keeps you from overflowing the limit.
The Short Arms of the Law is a straightforward drop with no hidden mechanics beyond the ones listed above. It drops frequently enough that you do not need to spend real money or spend excessive time on it. The only real decision is whether you farm it on regular or Savage difficulty, and that depends on how much time you want to commit per pull.
